Monday, November 13, 2017

A significant and quite unpleasant part of my job is to talk to upset customers.

Today I spent well over an hour exchanging pleasantries with an eBay customer who refused to accept the fact that eBay refers to every repair service listing as an "item" and shows, without vendors being able to control that, the words "Items available" on the page.

I learned, along the way, that my use of English language is bad, that our offer is fishy and that my statements are contradicting, so beware - what I say may or may not be correct and if it sounds fishy it might indeed be!

Oddly enough, eBay sided with our version of the story this time and rejected customer's claims, so we had to take care of his issue manually after he learned from another source he was wrong...which we did, of course.

Just for the record, here's part of the exchange, before it got messy:

The reason I am making this post in the middle of a fairly busy Monday is because literally half an hour after we were done with that customer (hardly winning his heart, but being fair nonetheless and not making any money of him!) I received another feedback, from another customer and it looked like this:

Much shorter and easier to process, wasn't it?

What I find ironic is not the mere coincidence that we received condemnation and praise in one day.

That is not uncommon.

What I find ironic is that both customers have no feedback on eBay, which makes it logical that both of them are brand new there and have not had past experience dealing with eBay and repair services.

The first customer accused us in misleading him and making false representation of a repair service due to the term "Items available" placed on the page by eBay (not us!); he also accused us to be profiting from misleading people like him.

The second customer, who used practically identical repair service offer, apparently had no such issues and is now apparently happily enjoying his or her TV at a faction of the cost of a new one.

Where do you think the difference in their experiences comes from?

If it was up to you which customer would you rather be - the ones who sees problems everywhere, but not in himself or the one that reads offer descriptions and follows instructions?

It isn't black and white, I know, and I do not ask anyone to trust us blindly.

yet the public fact is that roughly 98% of our customers on eBay find us of value.

Friday, September 22, 2017

Just fixed three YSUS boards EBR77185601 all with the exact same failure symptom and I think I narrowed it down to the essentials that need to be replaced for it to not fail when you try it again.

EBR77185601 is used in LG 60PB6650-UA, LG 60PB5600-UA, LG 60PB6600-UA and possibly others.
My experience is summarized in the below video:

The board failed twice on me until I had it all figured.
Actually there were three failures, but it turned out the last one was not the YSUS itself even though it sounded and looked a lot like it, only when I took it down it was all good and upon long and close inspection I found a noise filter cap busted on the top buffer board:

The video mentions that, but doesn't include the picture, which I took before finishing the work and ensuring everything worked fine at which point I made the video.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

It was love at first sight, partially because it was beautiful and probably just as much because I got it for about $20 (it was $800+ new) total because its display was coming in and out and it was rendered unusable.

Turned out it had a tiny detachment on one of the display tabs and I found the location and was able to actually fix it...somewhat.

I stuck a piece of hard paper between the LCD and the front bezel - it was even hidden from plain view - and that caused the detached tab to make contact well enough to a point where the TV would work for say 30 or more minutes.

Over time, however, probably due to the paper going thinner, it started failing more and more again and it got to the point where I pressed a little too hard one day and it cracked.

I had already gotten used to it by then and just bough a refurbished one, which I use to date and still like.

The parts of the old I listed on eBay and this is how I learned about someone wanting to get the main board.

I don't remember the details, but he eventually ended up sending their board to Coppell TV Repair LLC and we took dab at it.

Since then we've repaired a few other dead main boards from different LG 31MU97-B monitors and we've seen two different issues develop on those; I am sure there are more that will show over time and I can't be certain we'll be able to identify or fix all of them, but for the time being we are glad to offer exchange and repair services:

1) Exchange service for LG 31MU97-B main board (or rather buy a good working board and please please return yours without being tampered so you can get credit for it):

Every now and then we also have boards available for purchase with trade-in option for the old dud (CORE purchase), but customers frequently either do not return their boards or return them so badly damaged they either can't be repaired or can't be sold or warrantied because of the way they look....and that unfortunately ends up the sale-repair-sale cycle until anther board becomes available.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

In the past month we've seen a few units of Samsung UN50H6203AF in the shop with the same issue - TV starts up, backlight is there, but there's no image on the screen even though the T-CON LEDs are on in blue and it appears as if the T-CON is just fine.

Testing output voltage to the LCD panel shows that at first it gets a spike of proper voltage, but then goes down to 0.

Then we actually ended up "repairing" (though frankly I still don't dare call this repair) one of them with another one currently waiting. The "repair" is something we've done before as a last resort by means of losing portion of the panel and re-purposing the TV for digital advertising or other situation where one could go with missing an inch or so of the display.